Faculty & Staff

Mary Jo Nye

Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History Emeritus
History of Modern Physical Sciences
Department of History
302B Milam Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone: (541) 737-3433
Fax: (541) 737-1257
Email: nyem@onid.orst.edu

Mary Jo Nye's research interests include the history of chemistry and physics since the eighteenth century in western Europe, the UK, and the United States; the social and cultural history of science, including laboratory science, university education, and the political activities of scientists; and the philosophy of science, especially relations between theory and evidence.

Background

• Professor Nye completed her undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin, taking her Ph.D. in History of Science at the University of Wisconsin. From 1970 she taught at the University of Oklahoma, where she was named George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the History of Science in 1991. She was appointed a Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at OSU in 1994. Other affiliations include visiting research appointments at the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin.
• Professor Nye received the History of Science Society's Sarton Medal for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement awarded for 2006. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Corresponding Member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences.

Selected Publications

• "Re-reading Bernal: History of Science at the Crossroads in 20th-Century Britain," pp. 237-260 in Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in Honor of Tore Frangsmyr, eds. Marco Beretta et al. (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2008).
• "Historical Sources of Science-as-Social Practice: Michael Polanyi's Berlin," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 37, #2
  (2007), 411-436.
• "Working Tools for Theoretical Chemistry: Polanyi, Eyring, and Debates over the 'Semi-Emperical Method,'" Journal of Computational Chemistry 28, #1 (15 January 2007), 98-108.
  
• Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Ed. Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Volume v of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (1996; paperback ed., 1999).
• From Chemical Philosophy to Theoretical Chemistry: Dynamics of Matter and Dynamics of Disciplines, 1800-1950 (1993).